The CPIS weekly war
protest on Friday, January 28, 2011 in Colorado Springs.
The latest developments:
The final decision on the Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) is imminent and may
come before the summer is over.
The 30 or so Apache helicopters permanently stationed at Fort Carson do regular
training missions on the planes east of the Fort and up in the foothills and
mountains to the west and at the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site (PCMS). Some of
those missions involve the Special Forces detachment stationed here and are
kept in deep secrecy.
Fort Carson regularly hosts Aviation Brigades from other Army Posts. This usually
involves units who are training to go to Afghanistan, one from Fort Drum, New
York and the other from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Both those units did extensive
high altitude training in our nearby mountains and foothills. There will other
such training operations in the future whether or not Fort Carson gets the new
CAB.
If the CAB comes it will greatly expand the amount of helicopter training at
Fort Carson, on the eastern plains, in the mountains, and at PCMS. Just how
much we don't know. The Environmental Impact Statement on the CAB doesn't address
that issue at all.
Some time in 2008 the Army put forward a proposal to add 70,000 troops including
3 new Combat Brigades. As things progressed it was decided that one of those
new Brigades would be assigned to Fort Carson. An Environmental Impact Statement
(EIS) was done which included the possible assignment of a (CAB) to Fort Carson.
The EIS process ended on March 27, 2009 and the Record of Decision (ROD) for
the project was published in the Federal Register April 8, 2009.
Meanwhile the Army signed a contract on March 27, 2009, the same date as the
EIS was finished, with Bryan Construction. The contract was worth $11.9 million.
It is unclear when they actually began the work. Presumably they would have
had to do extensive surveying before moving any dirt.
On April 6, 2009 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates canceled the plan to add
3 new brigades. This action should have called a halt to construction but it
did not. Not only did Bryan construction continue their work but on May 29,
2009 Mortenson Construction got a big contract to start work on another piece
of the project. Their press release says their work was to be part of construction
for the new brigade, the one Gates canceled.
Sometime in June the Army made official the cancellation of the new brigades
which had been announced more than 2 months earlier by Gates.
All the while construction continued on the supposedly canceled project.
As the construction continued a new purpose for the construction was being formulated.
In July the U.S. Congress endorses the Army's solution to the new construction.
It will be for a construction project a "couple of years down the road". The
source for that is an interview I had with personnel of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Since the construction is for a new purpose there will not be any barracks constructed
at the Wilderness Road site. The current barracks were deemed adequate. There
is a hitch in this solution. When completed the Brigade using the new facilities
will have to commute several miles (5 or 6 I would guess) every day to go to
work. No new EIS work was done to include this fact. Apparently some Environmental
staff at Fort Carson made an issue of this but got overruled.
Christopher Juniper of the Sustainability Planning unit at FC put it this way
" I think you know that the sustainability planners are contractors to the Army
and are not authorized to speak for the Army. If we do so, we only put our own
livelihood and effectiveness in our jobs in peril, and it is not worth it."
At this point the Pentagon spigot got turned on full bore and one contract after
another got issued by the Army Corps of Engineers. Not sure what the final cost
is going to be, but it is in the neighborhood of a couple of hundred million
dollars give or take. A core spokesman told me it would all be finished in 6
or 8 months time.